Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/23

 variety of ideas, that no formal exposition of Greek religion as a whole was possible. The verbal limitations of a creed, a summa theologiae, would have been too narrow for the free, imaginative faith of Greece. It was a necessary condition of Hellenic polytheism that, as it came into being without any personal founder, without any authoritative sacred books, so in its development it should be hampered and confined neither by priestcraft nor by any literature purely and distinctively religious. The spirit which manifested itself in a myriad forms of worship could not brook the restraint of any one form of words.

And not only would it have been difficult to give adequate expression to the essential ideas of Greek religion, but there was no motive for attempting the task. Those of the philosophers who dealt with religion wrote and taught for the reason that they had some new idea, some fresh doctrine, to advance. Plato certainly abounds in references to the popular beliefs of his age: but his object is not to expound them for their own sake: rather he utilizes them as illustration and ornament of his own philosophical views: his treatment of them in the main is artistic, not scientific. In fact there was no one interested in giving to popular beliefs an authoritative and dogmatic expression. There was no hierarchy concerned to arrest the free progress of thought or to chain men's minds to the faith of their forefathers. A summary of popular doctrines, if it could have been written, would have had no readers, for the simple reason that the people felt their religion more truly and fully than the writer could express it: and few men have the interests of posterity so largely at heart, as to write what their own contemporaries will certainly not read. Thus it appears that there was neither motive nor means for treating the popular religion in literary form: to formulate the common-folk's creed, to analyse the common-folk's religion, was a thing neither desired nor feasible.

But because we observe an almost total absence of distinctively religious literature, we need not for that reason be surprised at the constant presence of religious feeling in all that a Greek wrote or sang. Rather it was consistent with that freedom and that absence of all control and circumscription which we have noted, that religion should pervade the whole life of the people, whose hearts were its native soil, and should consequently pervade